Kelly Denton-Borhaug – författare

The sharp and unforgiving suffering of the morally injured veteran cannot be fully understood, much less effectively addressed, without a comprehensive investigation of moral injury’s underlying causes in American culture and society.And Then Your Soul is Gone exposes the threads of violence that tie together the naturalized dynamics of U.S. ways of war and militarization with collective practices of national distraction and self-deception. It shows how these same threads of violence are also tightly woven and sacralized in the tapestry of U.S. national identity, tragically concealing moral injury from greater consciousness, and sourcing its toxic growth in the very lives of those the nation claims it most highly esteems, our military service members and veterans.Drawing on Claudia Card’s philosophical framework, moral injury here is characterized as an atrocity, “a foreseeable intolerable harm caused by culpable wrongdoing.” These atrocities are shown to be flash-points revealing important truths regarding the unlivable consequences of U.S. war-culture and highlighting the urgent need to rethink the meaning of U.S. nationalism, desacralize violence, and support life.And Then Your Soul is Gone will be of interest to students and scholars of religion and philosophy, military service members and veterans, concerned citizens, chaplains and religious leaders.

The sharp and unforgiving suffering of the morally injured veteran cannot be fully understood, much less effectively addressed, without a comprehensive investigation of moral injury’s underlying causes in American culture and society.And Then Your Soul is Gone exposes the threads of violence that tie together the naturalized dynamics of U.S. ways of war and militarization with collective practices of national distraction and self-deception. It shows how these same threads of violence are also tightly woven and sacralized in the tapestry of U.S. national identity, tragically concealing moral injury from greater consciousness, and sourcing its toxic growth in the very lives of those the nation claims it most highly esteems, our military service members and veterans.Drawing on Claudia Card’s philosophical framework, moral injury here is characterized as an atrocity, “a foreseeable intolerable harm caused by culpable wrongdoing.” These atrocities are shown to be flash-points revealing important truths regarding the unlivable consequences of U.S. war-culture and highlighting the urgent need to rethink the meaning of U.S. nationalism, desacralize violence, and support life.And Then Your Soul is Gone will be of interest to students and scholars of religion and philosophy, military service members and veterans, concerned citizens, chaplains and religious leaders.

The military-industrial complex in the United States has grown exponentially in recent decades, yet the realities of war remain invisible to most Americans. The U.S has created a culture in which sacrificial rhetoric is the norm when dealing in war. This culture has been enabled because popular American Christian understandings of redemption rely so heavily on the sacrificial. 'U.S War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation' explores how the concept of Christian redemption has been manipulated to create a mentality of "necessary sacrifice". The study reveals the links between Christian notions of salvation and sacrifice and the aims of the military-industrial complex.